Seth Moulton’s primary challenger: He surrendered to MAGA

We gotta get less woke, the centrist politicians say, and meet the American people where they are. What does that mean? On the Democratic side, at least, it’s often left unsaid — getting too specific would alienate the majority of Democratic voters — but it typically signifies a willingness to be a little-to-a-lot less accepting of transgender people as human beings with equal rights to participate in society. And this vague gesturing toward greater intolerance is generally presented as courageous truth-telling.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., told The New York Times days after the 2024 election. Former Vice President Kamala Harris had been mocked by the Trump campaign as the candidate “for they/them,” while the Republican billionaire was presented as “for you”; the Harris campaign chose not to respond to the televised line of attack, which by last October had aired more than 30,000 times in the battleground states that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.

To Moulton, who spent several weeks running for president in 2019, and other Democrats who have dabbled in the anti-social justice critique, the American people decisively ruled against the increased visibility and social acceptance of trans people when a slim plurality voted for Trump and a Republican trifecta in Washington. “I have two little girls,” Moulton told columnist Maureen Dowd. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Beth Andres-Beck isn’t so sure about all that. A software engineer by trade, they identify as agender, trans and queer — and hope to demonstrate that Democratic voters want “practical progress”: realism about what’s possible in Washington, but combined with a firm commitment to inclusive, liberal values. That means not conceding that a handful of trans athletes in a nation of some 350 million people is a crisis that demands national politicians rolling back their support for a persecuted minority.

In an interview with Salon, Andres-Beck spoke about why they decided to challenge Moulton in the September 2026 Democratic primary and how they would go about representing Massachusetts’ deep-blue 6th congressional district.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In a recent interview, you said that it’s been frustrating to watch your party “fail to rise to the moment.” So I just wanted to ask you, as somebody who’s decided to run as a Democratic primary candidate, what has been so frustrating, and how did that lead you to enter the race?

Andres-Beck: Specifically, my representative. I went to a town hall that he held and he lectured all of us on the importance of being polite, and talked about bipartisanship and then offered no actual solutions for all of the egregious behavior—the just absolutely wild stuff that we see going on. Recently he was giving a talk somewhere, standing in front of a marble fireplace, talking about how Democrats are out of touch—and I think he’s absolutely right—and just the lack of self-awareness to realize that he is part of that problem is part of the problem.

One thing I’ve noticed about the likes of Seth Moulton — and I’ve seen Sen. Chris Murphy make similar comments — is they make just a general, broad statement that Democrats have become a little bit too woke, and we’ve alienated people who might broadly agree with us on like the minimum wage and stuff, but we’ve gone down this culture war route. And they kind of suggest selling out trans people, in particular, but in a kind of vague, non-specific way. How do you respond to that kind of argument: that the Democrats got “too woke”?

Well, one, they never define “woke,” right? That’s just the word they throw out there. And I think we just saw with Rahm Emanuel’s [recent] interview, that they’re just pursuing their own things they want to see happen. This isn’t some noble cause trying to represent whatever their imaginary median voter is; voters aren’t frustrated and cynical about politics because of any particular policy. They’re cynical about politics because a lot of representatives on both sides of the aisle are taking money from the companies they regulate.

There are some notable exceptions. I think we certainly have principled members. We have people who aren’t doing that, but they have a harder time. They’re doing more work in order to not accept corporate donations or run PACs on the side or whatever. All of the ways that people are taking advantage of the money in politics right now. I think people are more cynical about the process than they are any individual policy details.

Most people aren’t paying attention to what’s on page 500 of the budget bill. And so trying to propose, as a solution to that, we should spend more energy on whatever is on page 500 of the budget bill isn’t going to solve the problem, which is that we have a whole bunch of people who went to either law school or business school at Ivy League institutions, after graduating from private schools, and that’s who is representing us in Congress, even though they don’t look like most of the people that they’re trying to represent.

I’m guessing from that answer that you did not go into business or law after attending private school and an Ivy League college.

I did not. I did attend Smith, which is a very good school in Western Massachusetts. It’s what brought me to Massachusetts, but then I went and waited tables, worked at a hospital, worked my way into tech, became a software engineer and never went back to graduate school for anything else. I got these practical skills and experience with technology that isn’t, right now, well represented in Congress. You can watch all of the hearings where they interview the CEOs of these Big Tech companies, and they ask them questions that make no sense — that demonstrate that they don’t understand the technology that they’re trying to regulate. And it makes sense: They’ve been in Congress for longer than that technology has been around. So I think it’s important to get experiences into Congress that are relevant to the work that Congress is trying to do.

How do you think your experience in software and technology would inform your votes on, say, crypto legislation? We just saw the Congress pass the GENIUS Act, which legalized stablecoins.

There’s no consumer protections. I think when they’re coming to Congress and asking for favors, that’s the right time to say that “with power comes responsibility.” We have 100 years of experience regulating financial institutions. If they want to be financial institutions, we should be providing a similar structure to protect the users of these technologies, rather than just legalizing scams.

I think a lot of the lawmakers that would present themselves as the most tech savvy members of the Democratic caucus tend to be also the ones most likely to vote for things like the GENIUS legislation or to promote the AI industry.

Yeah, I think they’re mostly talking to people who own these companies. There are organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that are doing their best, but there’s not an Electronic Frontier Foundation caucus in Congress. The people who they’re talking to are mostly people who are on the business side of these companies, not the users of these companies or the employees of those companies

Some on the left see how Congress passed the GENIUS Act and view that as kind of legalizing the next financial crisis. And they also saw Elon Musk’s role in government earlier this year, and I think that has led to a kind of general animosity towards technology — not returning to the 19th century or anything like that, but just kind of general skepticism of Big Tech and AI and all the claims made about that. How would you, as somebody who’s worked in the industry, perhaps present a more, I guess, progressive vision of how technology can actually help the United States?

I think one of the qualifications I bring is that I’ve spent my 20-year career in tech fighting people like Elon Musk—people who are incompetent but want to use technology to enrich themselves, personally, rather than make people’s lives better. Technology should work for workers. It should work for the people using the technology. It should work for the people who are building the technology, first and foremost. And then when we provide the value that technology can provide, that’s how the companies can make money.

But the first responsibility is to the people that we’re serving. And that attitude is not particularly, I’d say, popular among the venture capitalists who are going to make lots of money off of flipping a company. We’ve all seen when our favorite product gets bought out by some other company, and then it gets killed because they were just acquiring it for some tiny piece of it, right? Those are things that provide more value to America or Americans. And I think it’s time to ask: What is technology doing for us? How can government provide better services through technology rather than worse service? We shouldn’t be replacing Social Security workers with a chatbot — that’s not going to make things better. But Direct File was great.

I think everyone has some technology that they’ve used that is built around helping them, and we know how to build those. That’s not a mystery. We just have to choose to do it. And that’s what I want to bring to Washington is having the government build software, well, for regular Americans.

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Sort of a progressive fulfillment of what some people, I think, thought they might be getting from DOGE and the idea of getting a bunch of tech guys into government. It is kind of weird that you have to print out this form and mail it into the office — maybe some people believed we were just getting a technological overhaul of government, and that sounded pretty nice.

But instead, what we got was the people who come into companies do massive layoffs, and then, you know, two years later, try to hire those same workers back as contractors at twice the pay, because it turned out they were important after all.

I wanted to jump back to what I opened up with, which is just the kind of failure of the Democratic Party in general. You talked about your congressman, who you’re challenging, of course. I’m wondering if you’re happy with how Democratic leadership has approached the second Trump administration.

I think it is important to put the bulk of the blame on Republicans, because they control both houses of Congress right now. They have given up all the power of Congress. I think the founding fathers assumed that people would have more ambition and self-respect than any Republican in Congress has managed to muster so far. So with that said, I think we are having a challenge in the party — we’re negotiating what the coalition is, right? We’re figuring out what, as millennials hit midlife crises, as Gen Z moves into the workforce, all of these just linear progressions of time as boomers have retired, as Gen X is starting to retire; those transitions are always going to be a conversation more broadly. And I think making sure that people see a path forward for themselves in the party is an important part of keeping the party vital. We see energy in places like New York, but also Colorado, and I hope that the party can see those as opportunities rather than threats.

The world is different now; it’s really out of control. Now we have masked federal agents roaming the streets, kidnapping people, but turning that anger on other members of the party — on people who are trying to do things, on people who are passionate right now about getting involved and standing up for democratic ideals — is a waste of energy, when we could be using that to throw sand in the gears of Congress or the administration, or actually investigate the things going on.

I’ve been very heartened by the willingness to rise up and demand the release of the Epstein files. Being willing to fight for transparency is a necessary part of fighting the rampant corruption and all of the crimes that are going on right now.

You mentioned how the onus should be on Republicans, who, of course, control both houses and the executive branch and have, I think, objectively speaking, ceded much of their authority to the president. At the same time, some have argued that Democrats are not living up to their end of the bargain by pushing for the constitutional remedy to remove an out-of-control president, which is, of course, impeachment. On your website, you talk about Donald Trump having committed various alleged impeachable offenses, so I’m wondering how you would approach the issue of impeachment and how you will talk about it during your campaign.

Is it something that you think Democrats fall into a trap talking about — that it’s what Republicans want them to talk about, which is impeaching the president, rather than presenting a positive vision for the country or what have you? Or do you think it’s a necessary conversation to have right now?

Well, given that this corrupt Supreme Court has declared that impeachment is the only possible way to enforce the law, I think if we are standing up to the rule of law, impeachment has to be part of that. And as much as it may be routine — like there are so many crimes — any one of those is an impeachable offense. It’s very easy to become numb to how corrupt this administration is, how much nepotism is going on, how much self-dealing is going on. Jimmy Carter sold his Peanut Farm, right?

I feel like we have very much lost the plot, so continuing to be outraged is a radical act, because they want us to give up. They want us to get used to this, to accept it, to let them just loot the country for parts, and we need to not do that. And it’s going to take energy. It’s going to take creativity. It’s going to take a tenacious commitment to enforcing the law. But we should be Javert here: just keep going until we successfully get to the end.

It’s not like Trump is trying to redeem himself, right? He’s doing more things every day. He is ignoring even the Supreme Court. He is ignoring court rulings. He is selling [crypto] so he can take open bribes. He is coercing news networks. He’s turning news networks into arms of the state. All of that is egregiously illegal; violates the Constitution. And I think the Constitution is worth standing up for, even if that’s going to take energy, even if it’s hard, even if it is not going to happen overnight. The only way people are going to know these things are even happening is if we talk about them. And so we have to keep talking about them, and we have to keep making them as big a deal as they are.

Do you think calling and pushing for an impeachment vote is the vehicle to do that? To say, “Hey, these are a bunch of crimes, and the Constitution has a remedy.” It compels us to talk about this.

I think impeachment is the constitutional remedy to this. And every time there is a crime, we should be attempting to impeach. We should be pushing for the expectation that if a president commits a crime, they get impeached. And I don’t think that that’s a partisan thing. I think that that’s the basic way the rule of law works.

Another thing you talk about on your website is your commitment to “practical progress.” The question I have, though, is given the time that we live in — where bipartisanship is pretty much dead, and we have most Republicans co-signing what you consider to be criminal offenses by the Trump administration —what could “practical progress” possibly look like in such a fractured, contentious time?

I think there’s a couple of aspects that. One is, we don’t know what Congress is going to look like after the midterms. I think people, a lot of people, are very frustrated right now. My general approach, and this is something that I’ve used in my local work on the [Middleton] Affordable Housing Trust, is there’s a lot of things that aren’t all political props yet. If we can get people to agree on goals, then you can try things that no one has yet thought of. And so I’m willing to work with anyone who agrees with my goals on pursuing those particular things.

For example, health care for all Americans — no one is going to come out and say you should not get to go to the doctor. That would be a great way to lose elections. But once you get down into the nitty-gritty details of Medicare for all or Medicaid — we just saw them cut massive amounts for Medicaid, and they had to pretend that it wasn’t going to take anyone’s health care away, and obviously that’s a lie — but I think there are things we could try there that we just haven’t tried yet. Investment in community health clinics that provide free care, which is what I used when I first moved to Boston; investment in telehealth, which can serve rural communities where people have trouble getting to the hospitals. Those are things that we could try that people don’t necessarily have those calcified opinions around yet. And so those are pathways I see.

Obviously, the goal should be, down the line, providing a base level of care to every American. In the meantime, there are things we could do that would help right now and that we could get a broader group of people invested in. This is also why I’m interested in pursuing a robot tax, the idea being that, right now, it’s much cheaper to employ a robot than it is a human, because our tax code prefers them. So if we could make automation not the preferred policy of the government — it’s not something that anyone has decided yet is a Democratic idea or a Republican idea. It solves a problem that we haven’t bothered trying to solve yet. And that’s where I think we can make sort of concrete progress. We can deliver things for real Americans, whether or not we manage to solve everything about how dysfunctional Washington is.

I’m curious if there’s anyone in Washington you would like be flattered to be compared to, or anyone you see as meeting the moment and being perhaps a model for the Democrats going forward, and for your own career were you to enter public office.

One person I was struck by was Sen. Chris Van Hollen when he went to El Salvador; putting people first and trying something that he had no idea whether this was going to help at all, but he was willing to go out on a limb like that. I think that’s the kind of creativity we need in Washington.

You’re referring, of course, to going to El Salvador at a time when some Democrats were wary of maybe fighting on what was seen as Donald Trump’s turf of immigration.

Right. And Kilmar Abrego Garcia was there being tortured. And him going there, in addition to bringing attention to that, got Mr. Garcia out of that detention facility. So it both made a concrete difference to a person’s life and was able to break through the propaganda and the control of media … I think that it takes real courage to stand up [for] something, to not be ruled by polls, to do something just because it’s right. And that’s the kind of politician I want to be.